Monday, October 10, 2011

Loving God with our Minds: A Series in Logic. Part 5

When the rocks say they are 4 billion years old and the Bible says they are less than 10,000 years old; who do you believe: the author of the Bible or the author of the rocks?

Quotes like this are examples of reification where people attempt to turn abstract ideas into concrete terms. In literature, it's similar to the grammatical device of personification. This is fine in literature or poetry but it's a fallacy in a logical debate.

In the above quote, the speaker claims “the rocks say they are 4 billion years old.” My family is from eastern Kentucky and I grew up visiting my grandparents and cousins who lived in the Appalachian mountains. Needless to say, I've seen more than a few rocks in my life and I've never heard one of them talk! I can say with certainty that you have never heard a rock talk either. How then, can rocks “say” they are billions of years old? The reality is that it's some scientists who study rocks that say the rocks are billions of years old. The rocks haven't said a word.

Reification occurs fairly frequently. Here are some other examples:

“Science has proven the Bible wrong.”

“The evidence says that evolution is true.”

“Fossils tell us that the earth is very old.”

Things like “science”, “evidence”, and “fossils” are not living. They don't “do” anything. Only people can say or do things. In any debate, remember that you're not debating the evidence; you're debating what someone is saying about the evidence.

SPECIAL PLEADING

Special pleading is where a person holds himself to a different standard than he applies to you. This fallacy rivals ad hominem as the most common in the evolution v. creation debate because most secular science rests on a premise that contradicts itself. Here's an example that I've posted many times before. It's one of my favorite quotes from evolutionists:

"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. Scientific American Magazine, July 2002 [emphasis added]

In this quote, Scientific American claims that methodological naturalism is a fundamental tenet of modern science. However, there is no “scientific evidence” for this. They admit it's a “tenet” - a philosophical assumption akin to a religious belief (look it up).

Whenever evolutionists demand we only use “scientific evidence” in a debate, they are engaging in special pleading. They are saying that our philosophical or religious belief that there was a supernatural creation is not valid while their philosophical or religious belief that there must be a natural explanation is valid.

CIRCULAR REASONING

A lot of evolution involves circular reasoning. Perhaps the most glaring example is the use of index fossils. Evolutionists often date rocks according to the fossils they find in the rocks AND they use rocks to date the fossils. Here's a hypothetical conversation that illustrates this:

EVO: “This rock is 60 million years old.”

CREO: “How do you know that?”

EVO: “Because the fossils in the rock are of animals that lived 60 million years ago.”

CREO: “But how do you know the animals lived 60 million years ago?”

EVO: “Because they're in rocks that are 60 million years old!”

Of course, evolutionists don't see it that way. However, when scientists date a stratum as Triassic, for example, simply because of the fossils found in it, it is absolutely a case of circular reasoning.

Another example of circular reasoning is found in the term “survival of the fittest.” If “fit” is defined by something's ability to survive, we're left with a tautology – namely, “things that survive survive.”

While circular reasoning may occur within evolutionary theory, in this series we're more interested in circular reasoning that occurs in discussions between Christians and non-Christians. We sometimes see this when evolutionists reject the “evidence” for creation.

Evolutionists often ask for “evidence” for our theory. I believe that fossils are evidence for creation. Yet when we present them as evidence, evolutionists reject it based on their own interpretation of fossils. In other words, they claim fossils aren't evidence for creation because they are evidence for evolution. They are saying, in a sense, “these rocks can't be young because they're old.” You can see the circular argument.

Now one interesting thing about circular reasoning is that Christians are often accused of using it. The claim usually centers on our view of the Bible. Critics claim that we believe the Bible is the word of God merely because the Bible says it's the word of God. That's not exactly accurate. If the Bible is true, I would expect it to affirm itself to be true. By analogy, if someone asked me if I'm RKBentley, I would answer that I am. It's not circular to expect something true to affirm itself to be true.

On the other hand, many atheists hold a worldview that contradicts itself. They might claim, for example, they don't believe anything without evidence yet there is no evidence that truth is only obtained by evidence so they indeed believe something without evidence. They're being irrational. It would be as though someone believed I'm John Smith in spite of the fact that I claim to not be John Smith.

Irrational people are difficult to persuade. When someone follows circular reasoning, he sees everything as proof for his beliefs.

12 comments:

I'm not sure that scientists do, in fact, insist that there must be a natural explanation. At least, E.O. Wilson, in his book Consilience, stated that it was unlikely that human beings were smart enough to understand everything in the universe; they might be aspects of it forever beyond our comprehension.

But suppose, to take an analogy, we find a suspect's fingerprints at the crime scene, in blood that is a DNA match to the victim. There might be any number of unknown, even unknowable, explanations for that evidence, but surely there is one rather obvious and likely one? It would be reification, but not an outrageous case of it, to say to the suspect "you say you were never at the scene, but your fingerprints there say otherwise."

There might be any number of reasons why an isochron date of a sample from the K-T boundary, using several different mother-daughter isotope pairs, yields ratios consistent with an age of 65 million years -- but the most obvious and likely one is that the sample is, in fact, 65 million years old.

Note, by the way, that it's oversimplifying to say "the rocks are dated by the fossils, and the fossils by the rocks."

Index fossils are common fossils where fossils from the same genus or family show up in layer after layer of rock, but each individual species is common only in one narrow range and missing from others. Such fossils were used to establish relative dates (e.g. where many undisturbed layers of rock are piled one atop the other, fossil A is always found lower than fossil B, so rocks containing fossil A are presumably always older than rocks containing fossil B).

In some places, sedimentary rock layers containing a particular fossil species will lie directly above or beneath igneous rock layers (lava flows, volcanic ash, etc.) that can be radiometrically dated. This can be used to pigeonhole rocks containing a particular fossil within narrower and narrower margins of error.

You can say that this particular rock is sixty million because it contains a fossil that is otherwise known only from rocks that can be shown (by the principle of superposition and radiometric dating) to be, say, younger than 62 million years old and older than 57 million years old.

I would note in passing that it seems to me that radiometric dating falsifies young Earth creationism whether the dates are trustworthy or not. It would be a trivial matter for a non-trickster God Who wanted His creation to bear witness to His acts to arrange for radiometric dating to show that the oldest rocks are less than 10,000 years old, and clearly He would wish to do so if they were that young.

"Survival of the fittest" is not a tautology. Furthermore, tautologies are not circular reasoning. A statement supported by circular reasoning might be true, or false, but a tautology is necessarily true.

Anyway, the point of natural selection or survival of the fittest is that survival is non-random. If the traits of the offspring that survive to produce the next generation are, on average, the same as the traits of offspring that die before reproducing, then the survivors are clearly not fitter, on average, than the non-survivors.

Of course, there might be cases where some traits are more common in one generation than in earlier generations by sheer chance. There is a term for this: genetic drift. But there's a point to all those illustrations of a black and a grey peppered moth against different sorts of backgrounds, or descriptions of experiments with antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Often, it's very obvious why some traits are more common in one generation than in the previous: the black moths are better camoflaged against soot-covered branches; the penicillin-resistant bacteria aren't killed by penicillin, so they have a chance to reproduce.

Where a particular variant is conspicuously more likely to survive and reproduce than rival variants, generation after generation, it is reasonable to suppose that there is some reason beyond random chance ("drift") for this, even if we can't figure out quite what the reason is: that the survivors are indeed "fitter," not just "luckier."

Note, in passing, that while an accurate book might testify to its accuracy, an inaccurate book might make the same claim (cf. the literary output of Dan Brown). And I don't see how one would go about gathering evidence for the proposition that evidence matters (if you're not sure that evidence matters, what sort of evidence would convince you otherwise?), but we both depend on the assumption for evaluating claims that don't impinge directly on your theology: you wouldn't, for example, respond very well to a claim that Sarah Palin is a space alien if it was backed up by an insistence that evidence is not the only reason to accept a proposition.

You said, “I'm not sure that scientists do, in fact, insist that there must be a natural explanation.”

Um, did you read the quote from Scientific American? Didn't they say that “creation science” is a contradiction in terms? Why do you think they said that? I'll tell you why – it's the same reason they detailed in the rest of the quote; it's because they seek to explain the universe purely in terms of natural mechanisms.

You said, “But suppose, to take an analogy, we find a suspect's fingerprints at the crime scene, in blood that is a DNA match to the victim. There might be any number of unknown, even unknowable, explanations for that evidence, but surely there is one rather obvious and likely one? It would be reification, but not an outrageous case of it, to say to the suspect "you say you were never at the scene, but your fingerprints there say otherwise."”

As I said, reification is fine for literature and poetry. It can be powerful rhetoric and your analogy is not a bad example of how it can be persuasive. I just want people to understand what is really being said. Creationists are often accused of “denying the evidence.” I don't deny any evidence. I deny your conclusions about the evidence.

You said, “There might be any number of reasons why an isochron date of a sample from the K-T boundary, using several different mother-daughter isotope pairs, yields ratios consistent with an age of 65 million years -- but the most obvious and likely one is that the sample is, in fact, 65 million years old.”

How many times have you heard or read evolutionary scientists who say that the “design” observed in nature is only an apparent one? Richard Dawkins went to great lengths to explain why things look designed but really aren't. If things seem to be designed, wouldn't one obvious reason be because everything is designed?

You said, “Index fossils are common fossils where fossils from the same genus or family show up in layer after layer of rock, but each individual species is common only in one narrow range and missing from others. Such fossils were used to establish relative dates (e.g. where many undisturbed layers of rock are piled one atop the other, fossil A is always found lower than fossil B, so rocks containing fossil A are presumably always older than rocks containing fossil B).”

You've repeated a misconception that every evolutionist has about the fossil record. A previous comment that you made in reply to my remark about stasis in the fossil record has inspired me to write a post about it but I'm waiting until I wrap up this series. In the meanwhile, let me say this:

The fossils are not a record of time. They're not like a stop-motion animation of the history of life on earth. They're more like a snap shot of the animals alive at the time of the Flood. To say that animals lower in the fossil record are older is like saying the ice cubes in the bottom of the glass are older. When I fill a glass with ice, the cubes on the bottom might have been laid down first but they're not “older.”

You said, “I would note in passing that it seems to me that radiometric dating falsifies young Earth creationism whether the dates are trustworthy or not. It would be a trivial matter for a non-trickster God Who wanted His creation to bear witness to His acts to arrange for radiometric dating to show that the oldest rocks are less than 10,000 years old, and clearly He would wish to do so if they were that young.”

Scientists are wrong in their interpretation of the meaning of the uranium/lead (or whatever test) ratio in rocks. God told us plainly in His revealed word how He created the universe. We can also deduce from Scripture (though not quite as plainly) approximately when. If the world is indeed billions of years old but He said it's only thousands of years old, then He would truly be a trickster.

I've been a little pressed for time lately. Please bear with me and I'll get to all your comments. Thanks again.

Um, did you read the quote from Scientific American? Didn't they say that “creation science” is a contradiction in terms? Why do you think they said that? I'll tell you why – it's the same reason they detailed in the rest of the quote; it's because they seek to explain the universe purely in terms of natural mechanisms.

I'm not sure why they said that "creation science" is a contradiction in terms. One possibility would be that creation science starts with its conclusions, and insists that no possible evidence could overturn them. One is not doing science when one does that. Another is that creation science wishes to explain things in terms of causes whose properties are unknown and untestable. But an explanation is a reason why things are one way and not another, and such an explanation presumes that we understand how the relevant causes work, what effects they produce and cannot produce. A cause beyond our understanding can exist, but until and unless we understand it, it can explain nothing. Science can't deal with supernatural causes (and, again, any cause it can deal with is natural -- "natural" being more or less defined as "what science can deal with").

How many times have you heard or read evolutionary scientists who say that the “design” observed in nature is only an apparent one? Richard Dawkins went to great lengths to explain why things look designed but really aren't. If things seem to be designed, wouldn't one obvious reason be because everything is designed?

But in many ways, things don't seem to be designed. Living things are arranged in a nested hierarchy, groups united by many unique shared characteristics that are contained entirely in larger groups united by a smaller list of shared characteristics. No one designs things this way. For example, a manufacturer may install an identical GPS unit on this year's model of a sports coupe and an SUV, when no such unit was on last year's model. We don't see that in nature; bats don't have feathers, pelicans don't have mammary glands, etc. Nested hierarchies are observed in families of languages and in breeds of domestic animals -- things obtained by branching descent with modification from a common ancestor.

We have, in descent with modification by natural selection, an alterate explanation that can account for apparent design and for the nested hierarchy, vestigial structures, etc.

The fossils are not a record of time. They're not like a stop-motion animation of the history of life on earth. They're more like a snap shot of the animals alive at the time of the Flood. To say that animals lower in the fossil record are older is like saying the ice cubes in the bottom of the glass are older. When I fill a glass with ice, the cubes on the bottom might have been laid down first but they're not “older.”

That raises, of course, the question of why living things were laid down in that particular order. Modern whales, for example, occupy a variety of watery habitats, from rivers (river dolphins) to seas from the arctic to the equatorial. Ancient plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs seem to have been similarly diverse. Yet we don't find whales and plesiosaurs in the same strata, though presumably they lived and died in the same oceans. Why should plesiosaurs -- many different genera and species of different shapes, sizes, and presumably habits -- have all been buried in strata different from any whale?

For that matter, there are places in the fossil record where one finds numerous trilobites of a single species, though of different sizes and stages of development, from baby to adult. And in the layers above and below, one finds similar but different species, again in different growth stages. If all these were living at the same time, why would they be buried, not according to size or mass, but purely by species?

There is of course the sheer abundance of fossils -- not so much the ones that have been dug up, but the ones that are presumably still buried, based on sampling (assuming that nothing caused dead animals to be fossilized and preserved in exactly and only the spots that would be convenient for us to dig them up). Based on the small fraction of it that has been excavated, the Karoo formation in South Africa, about the size of California, contains some 800 billion vertebrate fossils with an average size about that of a fox. That's close to 8000 per acre, or about one every six square feet ... which would seem to strain the carrying capacity of even the extremely lush world that creationists posit for the pre-flood Earth. It seems rather more plausible that they didn't all live at the same time.

God told us plainly in His revealed word how He created the universe. We can also deduce from Scripture (though not quite as plainly) approximately when. If the world is indeed billions of years old but He said it's only thousands of years old, then He would truly be a trickster.

God told Flavius Josephus, the authors of the book of Enoch, and Theophilus of Antioch, inter alia, that the Earth was a flat disk surmounted by the solid dome of the sky. God told dozens of generations of Christians (including a few living today: cf. Gerardus Bouw's comment that if we can't trust what the Bible says about the rising of the sun, how can we trust it on the rising of the Son?) that the Earth, while spherical, is fixed immobile at the center of the universe, and that the sun orbits it. Indeed, there seem to have been more medieval Bible scholars who thought that the world was made long before ca. 4000 BC, than there were who suspected that it might orbit the sun. There are so many ways in which you have interpreted the Bible to fit modern science, what are one or two more?

"The fossils are not a record of time. They're not like a stop-motion animation of the history of life on earth. They're more like a snap shot of the animals alive at the time of the Flood. To say that animals lower in the fossil record are older is like saying the ice cubes in the bottom of the glass are older. When I fill a glass with ice, the cubes on the bottom might have been laid down first but they're not “older.”"

I look forward to that post and will wait patiently, as I have been taking an interest lately in the ways creationists try to explain the fossil record (I am considering doing my own blog series on ways other Christians have misused the fossil record, including theistic evolutionists). Naturally, based on my own observations, I don't believe you can give a sufficient explanation for the fossil record without missing out substantial portions of it, not least ichnofossils, but I will enjoy reading it nonetheless.

You said, “I'm not sure why they said that "creation science" is a contradiction in terms.”

Steven! SA explained why creation science is a contradiction. It's because a supernatural explanation (i.e. divine creation) cannot be scientific because “science” seeks to explain the universe only in terms of natural mechanisms.

You said, “But in many ways, things don't seem to be designed. Living things are arranged in a nested hierarchy, groups united by many unique shared characteristics that are contained entirely in larger groups united by a smaller list of shared characteristics. No one designs things this way.”

If I examined car models side by side year after year, the cars would seem to “evolve.” They're still designed. We can also group vehicles into types of hierarchies: cars have more in common with a motorcycle than a boat yet even cars and boats have certain things in common. Regardless of that, you have glossed over the point that many other things seem designed. It's so obvious that Francis Crick once said scientists should constantly remind themselves that things aren't designed.

You said, “Modern whales, for example, occupy a variety of watery habitats, from rivers (river dolphins) to seas from the arctic to the equatorial. Ancient plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs seem to have been similarly diverse. Yet we don't find whales and plesiosaurs in the same strata, though presumably they lived and died in the same oceans.”

The fact that we haven't yet found whale and plesiosaur fossils together is, by itself, not evidence they didn't live together (that is an “argument from silence”). But this was the point of my post, “Evolved earlier than thought”. Scientists think they have certain things figured out yet they sometimes find those fossils that upset their theory. Maybe someday we'll find a whale and plesiosaur together and read the headline, “New Fossil shows whales evolved earlier than thought.”

You said, “There are so many ways in which you have interpreted the Bible to fit modern science, what are one or two more?”

Interpreting the Bible to fit science is what usually gets Christians into hermeneutical trouble in the first place. When the Church believed in geocentricity, the Ptolemaic model was the accepted scientific model. There is no passage that overtly teaches geocentrism.

You said, “I look forward to that post and will wait patiently, as I have been taking an interest lately in the ways creationists try to explain the fossil record (I am considering doing my own blog series on ways other Christians have misused the fossil record, including theistic evolutionists).”

I would say there is a touch of “poisoning the well” in your remark. It would be like me saying, “I'm looking forward hearing your reply because I need more examples of logical fallacies used by evolutionists.”

You said, “Naturally, based on my own observations, I don't believe you can give a sufficient explanation for the fossil record without missing out substantial portions of it, not least ichnofossils, but I will enjoy reading it nonetheless.”

Considering that this is a blog and not a peer-reviewed scientific journal or doctoral thesis, I'm sure there will be a substantial portion of the fossil record that won't be addressed. I intend to highlight only one very specific point – how the idea that time is reflected in the fossil record is a misnomer.

With regards to "poisoning the well," you might notice that I mentioned that I will be critiquing Christian misuse of the fossil record from all creation beliefs, including theistic evolution.

"Considering that this is a blog and not a peer-reviewed scientific journal or doctoral thesis, I'm sure there will be a substantial portion of the fossil record that won't be addressed. I intend to highlight only one very specific point – how the idea that time is reflected in the fossil record is a misnomer."

Well so far I have not seen anyone address ichnofossils, which are amongst the most common and do not function the same way as the more familiar body fossils. On Facebook I quite recently had someone ask to discuss the fossil record, so I explained how it shows evolution. In response they took your approach and tried to show that the timescales were wrong, despite that my own post said nothing about absolute dates. You will need to handle relative dates and not just absolute dates.

RKBentley

About me

I'm a husband, a father, and a Christian. Being a Christian is not something I do on Sundays but rather it is who I am. My faith influences everything I do. Christians are commanded to always be ready to give an answer – a reason for the hope that is in us. I take that command seriously. Psalm 19:7 says that the testimony of the LORD is sure. If we base all of our thinking on the Bible, we can't go wrong. I started this blog to encourage other Christians and challenge critics on a variety of issues. Whether you agree or disagree with me, you're welcome here. Please follow me on Twitter and friend me on FaceBook! God bless!!